Richard Corbett, Labour MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber, explains how eurosceptics massively over-estimate the amount of UK law that originates in Brussels.

By Richard Corbett MEP

For what looks like a question of fact, this simple point has become a political hot potato. Eurosceptics are keen to inflate the figure as much as possible so they can claim that the UK is “being run from Brussels”: Nigel Farage famously claimed that the figure was “something like 75%”, before being forced to admit that that number was just his own invented estimate.

Of course, the question can be tricky to answer, because a lot depends on what counts as ‘a law’ and what counts as ‘European in origin’. So a few weeks ago, the House of Commons Library did research, doing their best to take into account these difficulties.

The figure they came up with was 13.2%: that’s the proportion of UK legislative acts passed in the last 15 years, both primary legislation and statutory instruments, that refer to the EU or flow from an EU-level agreement. They admitted that this figure was likely to be an overestimate, though, since they counted every single reference to Europe in any law — whether that be a full-blown implementation of a European agreement, or simply a passing mention of the EU in an entirely domestic law, for instance to define a term.

So far, so good. But, a few days ago, the eurosceptic pressure group Business for Britain stuck its oar in and proposed their own answer to the question in a pamphlet audaciously entitled ‘The Definitive Answer’. Their figure? 64.7%

We can look at the details of the research in a moment. But first, whichever side of the EU debate you’re on, please put aside your prejudices for a second and think about this objectively. Which of these two bodies would you say is the more reliable? On the one hand we have a non-partisan, highly respected House of Commons library, saying that a figure of 13.2% is likely generous. On the other hand, we have a eurosceptic pressure group putting forward a figure so high it’s suspiciously close to Farage’s inflated “estimate”. If you came into this with no preconceptions at all, whom would you trust?

Sure enough, a quick skim of BfB’s pamphlet immediately rings some alarm bells. Having liberally applied the word “definitive” throughout their press release, they admit on page 5 of the actual pamphlet:

“It is immensely difficult to accurately quantify the impact of EU legislation.”

Indeed, the approach BfB used so to get the 64.7% figure is far from uncontroversial. They take the House of Commons interpretation of ‘EU-influenced’, but quietly remove the caveats. Then they add to this every directly-adopted European regulation, on the pretext that these all represent “laws in force in Britain” even though they haven’t passed onto the statute books via Westminster.

This is bizarre. European regulations are typically focused, technical, and highly limited in scope. They apply to specific corners of the European market, such as olive growers and tobacco farms. Plenty of them are specific to the EU’s internal operations. Many are time-limited, meaning they expire every year and have to be renewed. In order to generate their 65% figure, BfB has had to count every renewal of every regulation as a full-blown ‘law that applies in the UK’.

I suppose you could factor in these kinds of regulations. But then you would have to do the same on the UK side, and count every local parking regulation, traffic control order, clause of the Anglican church’s ‘canon law’, and so on. After all, these are technically ‘laws that apply in the UK’, using BfB’s tendentious interpretation. I haven’t done the maths, but if you really want to see how many of these there are in Britain, legislation.gov.uk will tell you. To put it mildly, there are a lot. Somehow I don’t think the figures will come out looking very eurosceptic-friendly if we go down that road.

Finally, I want to try to inject a note of sanity into the debate, by suggesting that the question is an odd one to ask anyway.

Firstly, EU rules are not imposed on us by some alien power. We are Europe: we agree shared policies with our European neighbours on issues where we have overlapping or mutual interests. We make agreements at European level when we recognise that acting at national level would be less effective. And all new EU laws are approved by national ministers in the EU Council (accountable to their national parliaments) as well as by directly elected MEPs.

Secondly, what good, really, is crude law-counting? If the UK passed just one big law a year that implemented all our miscellaneous European agreements, would eurosceptics then be happy to say that only 0.1% of UK law was European in origin? No. What matters is not the number of individual legal titles, but the content of those titles.

Thirdly, it’s not like we wouldn’t bother making laws if we didn’t agree them at European level. We’d just make them in a different place, with less effect.

And finally: what really counts as a “law in force in Britain”? Forget the EU for a moment. Suppose you run a business in the UK and you want to sell windscreen wipers to Germany. Technically, only UK regulations apply. But of course there are also German regulations, and you had better follow those too, or else you can’t sell your products. Now suppose you want to expand your business to the Netherlands, or Portugal, or Poland. Again, none of the rules of those countries technically apply to your business in Britain. But from your point of view, they may as well do. When it comes to windscreen wipers, you are de facto governed from abroad, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Now suppose 28 countries were able to get together and agree to replace their 28 different sets of windscreen wiper regulations with just one shared set. Suppose they set up a democratic system consisting of elected governments and elected parliamentarians to debate and agree that shared set. And suppose that shared set, once duly agreed, could enter into force across the entire European market in one go.

In that scenario, would we really complain that a UK windscreen wiper law had gone out the window and a European windscreen wiper law had come in, nudging that terrible percentage from 13.1 to 13.2? Or would we rather celebrate the fact that a regulatory burden had been lifted, and trade had just been made a little freer for everyone?